Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday November 20, 2011 @05:57AM
from the sorry-no-centerfold dept.

1sockchuck writes "The twice-a-year list of the Top 500 supercomputers documents the most powerful systems on the planet. Many of these supercomputers are striking not just for their processing power, but for their design and appearance as well. Here's a visual guide to the top finishers in the latest Top 500 list, which was released this week at the SC11 conference."

Looking at some photograph,I see your point - something plain or just black with some blinkenlighten like the Connection Machine would have been enough.

Though, when you buy a system like that, the cost isn't the hardware, it's the field and support engineers available 24/7, customer support, projects and power consumption that are the big costs. There used to be a joke, "Buy a super-computer from us, and we'll throw the building in for free".

Modern day supercomputer systems use a standardized rack frame system and intercommunication fabric so that the oldest and slowest nodes can be pulled out, while the newest and fastest ones can be slotted in straight away. That removes the overhead of having to construct a new building, power supply system, air conditioning and network infrastructure just to do a simple upgrade.

Though, when you buy a system like that, the cost isn't the hardware, it's the field and support engineers available 24/7, customer support, projects and power consumption that are the big costs. There used to be a joke, "Buy a super-computer from us, and we'll throw the building in for free"

Wrong. Actually, current systems (e.g. Blue Waters) easily cost $200 mio. to procure, and that is just the hardware and support for 1 year, excluding staff, power etc.

Modern day supercomputer systems use a standardized rack frame system and intercommunication fabric so that the oldest and slowest nodes can be pulled out, while the newest and fastest ones can be slotted in straight away. That removes the overhead of having to construct a new building, power supply system, air conditioning and network infrastructure just to do a simple upgrade.

Sorry, but wrong again. Modern supercomputers quite often use custom interconnects (e.g. Cray's Seastar or Gemini or Fujitsu's Tofu). Also, as K and Jaguar show, the cooling solutions are commonly custom, too. This is because node density is growing exponentially and off-the-shelf interconnects and cooling can't keep up with this.

Thanks for that info. Maybe different supercomputer centers have different purchasing requirements, especially those that can't expand space or have be really cost-effective.

Guess things are just remaining as they are. That's why they had/have custom buildings - they would house the custom cooling system, custom interconnects as well as power supplies as well as offices for the engineers.

The entire building is a plastic white egg, there's a power button, a really big plug, 1 Ethernet jack, 1 usb port and several proprietary ports that no one but Apple uses. The preferred interface is a small touchscreen kiosk carefully hidden with tasteful landscaping.

There are no user-serviceable parts inside, opening the shell voids the warranty. What few upgrade options available when ordering will have exorbitant mark up and it will be slightly slower and a lot more expensive than most of its competitors. If anything breaks the recommended solution is to demolish it on site and order a new one.

Way back in '03, Virginia Tech built a cluster of 1,100 Mac G5's. It came in at #3 on the Top 500 list that year, and at $5.2M, it was a fraction of the cost of the next cheapest supercomputer in the top ten. And it was assembled by students in 3 weeks, using stock G5 towers fitted with InfiniBand cards.

It was later upgraded to G5 xServe boxes, and as of 2008, was still ranked 281 on the Top 500 list [top500.org].

The "plastic white egg" is a good first-order approximation of Apple's design for their new campus [techcrunch.com], which they'll be building at the old HP facility off Tantau Ave. in Cupertino. Well, fried egg, anyway, since there's a hole in the center...

Well supercomputers tend to do look nice. If you are going to pay millions of dollars on a computer it better look pretty darn cool to impress the board of directors who approved it.I use to work with a sales man who worked for Cray. Those old supercomputers with all those blinking lights knobs and buttons were there just to make the computer look impressive. They were not overly functional. Companies who buy these expensive computers would flaunt them and have them quite visible in their organization. Not just stuck in a back room.

All I saw were boxes with fancy paint jobs - and some not so fancy. What's the big deal?The Crays at least were tubular with a seat around them - like a bus or train station bench. Come on! How a spherical super computer? That would have the shortest paths between sub sections, too!

What would be nice is a ranking on how much the supercomputer has accomplished. If they were ranked by how much they have saved their nations in any number of categories, such as reduced costs or better designs or better medicine. I have also read that programmers are struggling to create programs that use these supercomputers at their given speed. It could be like most home computers that these super computers are mostly idling. It would also be nice if the article was accurate. I quote "It is Japan’s highest-ranked supercomputer. Plans are being developed for Tsubame 3.0." The K super computer is Japanese so it would be Japan's highest ranked supercomputer.

When did the Top500 become a competition to see who could paint the prettiest picture on the side of a rack alleyway. I clicked the link expecting to see cables, guts, sweet AC units, and other nerd porn.

Instead I got something designed by a marketing department and in some cases just graphical rendering.

For that matter, I'd paint the outside so that it looks like a real sci-fi super computer, tape reels and all. As long as someone says "man that looks complicated" it's mission accomplished. That's why you pay the big bucks right?

... and I swear that one image that claimed to be HP systems looked a lot like racks full of Sun x4600-series systems.
I fear that we'll never stop mistakenly referring to clusters of computers as a supercomputer.

The first top 500 list was published in June 1993 [top500.org].
The fastest computer on that list was a CM-5/1024
made by Thinking Machines Corporation. It was rated at: 59.70 Rmax(GFs) and 131.00 Rpeak(GFs).

Last place on that first top 500 list [top500.org] (scroll down)
was held by a VP-200 made by Fujitsu/SNI which had 1 core and was rated at 0.422 Rmax(GFs) and 0.533 Rpeak(GFs).

I've heard the expression about carrying a supercomputer in your pocket - how close are we?
I'd expect most of the latest Android/iPhone/smartphones can beat that last-place finisher from 1993.
I'm doubtful that any of these devices could beat that first place finisher, but I suspect desktops (especially with GPUs) should be there by now. If you're are interested, you can get the software from here [top500.org].

The Tegra 3 chip that's showing up in phones this spring and Transformer Prime tablet now is about 7.2 GFLOPs [anandtech.com]. That's more than enough to be top 10 in 1993. Current ARM architectures might go all the way up to fast enough to take that number one spot in reference sample designs now but they consume too much power to go in your pocket on retail shelves as yet. Maybe in a year or two.

Mali T658 [hothardware.com] and PowerVR [imgtec.com] are two to watch here. Mali is supposed to go up to 350 GFLOPs. It still amazes me that in 1993 that machine cost about $70 million [chrisvernon.co.uk] in today's money and you can almost match it today for under $500.

There used to be an easy-to-find graph showing the improvement over time of number one, number 500, and the total of 1-500. It gave me warm fuzzies to see the steady increase. I can't find that chart anymore. Help?

the NSA has always been at the forefront of supercomputing, and it has always been incredibly secretive about it.

who knows about other nations intelligence agencies

Until the day arrives when the NSA declassifies some of the super-powerful technology it's supposed to always have, my bet is that they only have slightly evolved versions of what you see here.

The NSA has no processor foundries. They have no manufacturing plants. They don't have chip designers on staff (or, at least, not very many.) The amount of money they'd have to pay to get custom super-parts developed is dwarfed by the billions and billions spent to improve commodity architectures. There's just no way

according to James Bamford's books, especially the last two, they actually did have a chip foundry, they have been at the top of several supercomputer programs, and they are the only reason that CRAY survived in a capitalist economy where massive supercomputing R&D doesn't have a quick ROI.

we don't know what they have today. but we know what they had in the past, vs what everyone thought was going on in the past. and what everyone thought was wrong.